


Thresholds

by Justgot1



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-01
Updated: 2013-09-01
Packaged: 2017-12-25 08:03:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/950694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Justgot1/pseuds/Justgot1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not a new work, I'm combining the three short fics of the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/34080">Thresholds series</a> into one, chaptered work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Liminal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock only understands change through full transformation, or annihilation. He has always preferred to fall and let the motion unfurl him.
> 
> \--- __
> 
> **Liminal**   
>  _1\. Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold._
> 
> \---

Sherlock doesn’t understand half-measures.  That is not how he lives his life.  Sherlock only understands change through full transformation, or annihilation. He does not have the patience for a chrysalis; he has always preferred to fall and let the motion unfurl him.  

The fallout of this method is always difficult to predict. 

Sherlock in doubt seeks a certain kind of liminal space.  As a child, in confusion, he hid in places not meant for pausing or for ruminating:  landings, hallways.  As if the tangle of his fears could be unwound by the energy of movement imbued in a place used for passage.  The invisible currents of transition.  

His absence was just another liminal state.  Or perhaps it wasn’t.  It may have been more complete than he knows, he can’t _know_.  Uncertain.  The movement of his self through the brutal tasks he’d set was a kinetic annihilation, and it was always going to lead him back here.  That was never in question.  In whatever state he was left. 

There were no half-measures taken, so there will be no quarter given.   _Fair enough_ , he thinks, pausing in a hallway, on a landing. 

But it is not in his nature to resist thresholds for long.  He steps to the edge, and falls through.

 

 

 


	2. Still

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If some are the agents of chaos, then it falls to others to be the ones who endure. This is a rare gift.
> 
> \---
> 
> **Still**   
> _1\. Motionless_   
> _2\. Continuing_
> 
> \---

John is a man of reaction. Not a passive man, heavens no, but if some are the agents of chaos, then it falls to others to be the ones who endure. This is a rare gift. In the path of oncoming fire, most of us are wood to be consumed to ashes. Some scarce few are steel, who embrace the fire without fear, burning to be tempered.

John transforms by trial. This is a different sort of motion that is no less reckless: letting change run him over, then picking up the pieces. But John is a man _made_ of pieces, stronger at the welds. Hammered.

The worst part of Sherlock’s loss is the stillness, after. John trembles at stillness and stills when in motion. But Sherlock knew that the trembling was just the tremor of energy held in check. His irresistible force would meet not an immoveable object, but an object to be moved, aimed, fired – a bullet.

John in quiescence is an object in search of a force. Reaction. _Nothing ever happens to me_ , John thinks, falsely.

Now, the stillness is taking on the quality of a held breath before a scream. Something in John stills in recognition. John, too, cannot resist a threshold.

Stepping to his door, hand on the knob, he knows inside that the next force to come, however it should befall him, he will catch it. He will endure it. It will propel him, and he will fly.

 

 


	3. Emergence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You are a horror of a man,” John spits at him, furious.
> 
>  _Harsh,_ Sherlock thinks. _But not inaccurate, considering._
> 
> \---
> 
> **Emergence**   
>  _1\. Coming into view._   
>  _2\. Coming into being._
> 
> \---

“You are a horror of a man,” John spits at him, furious.

 _Harsh,_  Sherlock thinks.  _But not inaccurate, considering._

He’d committed some horrors, in the last three years.

For all that the detective was in constant motion, it had always been the motion of the chase – the earnest, flat-out, open pursuit of the plains, sometimes the lion, sometimes the wildebeest. There was something honest about this that always pleased him.

It was something else entirely to be the predator in the grass, motion coiled, eyes keen for the moment of weakness. Pulse in the target’s neck beating with the blood he’d soon be spilling, teeth bared, in the full sun.

John scrapes his eyes from Sherlock’s shorn head to his booted feet.  Sherlock feels every alteration as if they glow with outline: broken nose, healed; broken fingers, three, healed; numerous cuts, scarred; two more, sutured; manacle bruises, gone to green. Interior scars, innumerable; healing varied.

Sherlock has unfurled into a brutal maturity.

Sherlock had been a child, before. He’d had no idea. He’d been a child, living with a man, and he’d had  _no idea._

He knows it now, though.

He is a horror, and he is a man, but it isn’t the horrors that made him so. In the season of sex/death/love, he knows which one took him to the edge, and over.

And which one brings him back, new.

 


End file.
